"Always
confounding
even when
it seems accessible, the mysterious and gripping
plot raises
unanswerable
questions about time, memory and the progress of
life on this planet."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

The leftist French writer, photographer, editor,
videographer, digital
multimedia artist and filmmaker Chris Marker ("Sans
Soleil"), directed
and wrote "La Jetee" (which means The Pier). It's
perhaps best known
today
as the movie that inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.
But it would be
remiss not to point out that this film shot on a
shoe-string budget and
only being 27 minutes, still had a much greater impact
than the bigger
budgeted full-length feature.

It's told through a sparse voice-over narration, the
showing of black
and white still photos (the popular at the time French
literary genre
of
the photo-roman--photo-novel--a comic book form), and
it uses an eerie
bittersweet score (featuring stock music cues, Russian
choral music by
the Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral choir, and
several music cues by
the
popular British composer Trevor Duncan).

Always confounding even when it seems accessible,
the
mysterious
and gripping plot raises unanswerable questions about
time, memory and
the progress of life on this planet.

It's a fictionalized account of a Paris just before
and
after World
War III. It begins at the pier of Orly airport some
years before WWIII,
where there's a haunting image of a woman's face at
the end of the
pier.
It follows a man with no memory, living in the
post-World War III
Paris,
who is a survivor prisoner that underground commanders
use as a
guinea-pig
in a time-travel experiment run in their lab. This man
was chosen
because
of his vivid dreams, showing he's obsessed upon the
image of a young
blonde
woman's shocked expression after witnessing the
shooting of a man; he
was
a young boy at the time when he was visiting the pier
at Orly before
the
big war. The man is given a chance by his captors to
discover for
himself
the true significance of this incident. It leads to
his return to the
past
via dreams, turning down a trip to the future, and
falling in love with
the same woman he saw at the pier who is now sleeping.
She opens her
eyes,
which is the only shot in the pic of movement--like in
a film.

It's a tantalizing sci-fi short film, one I believe
is a
masterpiece,
that leaves us pondering over an impenetrable puzzle
about mankind, its
future and the importance of love in a world where
there doesn't seem
much
else to hold onto that's as tangible.